Some thoughts on IT and UK Social Housing from a unique perspective of over 20+ years working with over 50 RSL's and social landlord groups.
Also a healthy knowledge of music over the last 5 decades
Available for independent housing RSL IT reviews, implementation, procurement of HMS, Repairs, CRM, EDM, DLO, Financial, Scheduling systems, critical friend etc. In Scotland I work with the super folks at Arneil Johnston.
Check us out on Soundcloud https://soundcloud.com/housingitguy/

Monday, 7 March 2016

Sensoria

We increasing hear about the IOT (Internet Of Things) and how dozens if not hundreds of sensors will be creeping into our homes & lives, to revolutionise the way we live. One bit of tech that has already, stealthily found its way into our tenant and customer lives is the Smartphone. Can you even imagine a life without one these days?

Walking around with your Smartphone you are a mobile CCTV and GPS rolled into one. What if we could harness our tenants and customers as 'sensors'? It would be good, although do you think too far-fetched, for the real world? Consider how Corries old resident 'Neighbourhood Watch' stalwart Percy Sugden, might have made use of a Smartphone?

Well, following on from my request earlier this year, for New Sensations, the super Suzy Robinson has highlighted a pretty amazing way to make this a reality. Adactus Housing in Leigh, Lancashire, (quite local to me,) have recently enhanced their 'Adactus500', which has been running already for over five years. Tenants and customers have been invited to be 'sensors' for the landlord and it seems to be going well.

Suzy, such a good egg, kindly organised my own red-carpet tour, of how they have achieved this online.

The 500 is a combination of the Adactus tenant participation and customer reward functions, all hosted online. It rendered nicely on my tablet, which is the kind of device our tenants are most likely view the site on.

Customers who sign up can earn points by getting involved in activities and also progress to a 'premium' membership upgrade. Activities are based around some elements of traditional Tenant participation, such as any RSL would certainly recognise. It includes satisfaction surveys, scrutiny panels such as for Universal Credit, and being a customer services mystery shopper.

So where do the 'sensors' come in? Well, Adactus are looking to harness customer Smartphone's, eyes and ears, in number of key areas. A number of activities are designed to encourage customers to share issues about their homes and neighbourhoods, capturing details via video / snaps on their phones. Geotagging allows locations to easily be pin-pointed and Adactus staff to be alerted to many problems, potentially they would never be aware of.

Some of the current smartphone activities, included taking snaps of corridor areas and of heating controls, together with passing on comments . Successfully completing five photo tasks, is enough to promote the customer to Premium status.

Each task can be submitted just once by a 'standard' member, but repeated every 30 days by a 'premium' one. The quality of submissions is carefully monitored, as good images are encouraged. Clear, in-focus image are obviously more useful to estate and repair teams at Adactus. Customers who can manage to achieve good quality, will then be encouraged to take more. Every time a photo task is approved, the ticker counts down until they are rewarded by upgraded to Premium.

This is encapsulated in the Adactus strategy, in the following way:

The Group will encourage its smart-phone owning tenants to become an important part of its approach to service quality control. Through the Adactus 500, tenants will be rewarded for supplying live data (for example, images) of the condition of properties and neighbourhoods. These data will, alongside staff feedback and supervisors’ inspection results, be used to direct services such as maintenance and ASB.

The proof of the pudding of course, is what level of sign up is being achieved? Well, as of last month it was running at 1269 out of a total of nearly 13,000 homes. So a very healthy 10%. Higher than most RSL's I generally encounter. The work on the '500' has been recognised by TPAS, as its just been shortlisted for excellence in digital involvement

I really liked the way this had been done. It was simple and straight forward to use and I can see why so many customers are taking part, making this a success. I think Adactus are ahead of the curve here, potentially providing an imaginative template for others who can easily make use of the same innovations. A big thank you to Suzy, catch her tweets at @Suzy_Adactus

Total Pageviews

About Me

View my full profile at LinkedIn.
To follow my tweets, add me @HotpixUK.
I am available for Business Process Review, procurement advice, alignment or project management, critical friend or other appointments.
Some of my community and big society photography can be seen at Flickr.
UK Mobile - 07854-655009
This blog combines my work interests of housing organisations getting the most from their IT, my love of monopoly and my oversized music collection. Every blog post ends with a music track. A good excuse to exhume old ghosts from time to time 8-)
Find me on BlogCatalog
Catch a talking archive of this blog at https://soundcloud.com/housingitguy/